Establishment .
The mine owner to the miner: "A socialist, you say? My son is a socialist too, but without going on strike..., that is why he already has his own capital..." The party was founded in 1921 when the
Bolshevik-inspired
maximalist faction won control of Romania's
Social-Democratic party—the
Socialist Party of Romania, successor to the defunct
Romanian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and the short-lived
Social Democratic Party of Romania (the latter was refounded in 1927, reuniting those opposed to communist policies). The establishment was linked with the socialist group's affiliation to the
Comintern (just before the latter's Third Congress): after a delegation was sent to
Bolshevist Russia, a group of moderates (including
Ioan Flueraș,
Iosif Jumanca,
Leon Ghelerter, and
Constantin Popovici) left at different intervals beginning with January 1921. The party renamed itself the
Socialist-Communist Party () and, soon after, the
Communist Party of Romania ( or
PCdR). Government crackdown and competition with other socialist groups brought a drastic reduction in its membership—from the ca. 40,000 members the Socialist Party had, the new group was left with as much as 2,000 or as little as 500; after the
fall of one-party rule in 1989, Romanian historians generally asserted that the party only had around 1,000 members at the end of World War II. Other researchers argue that this figure may have been intentionally based on the Muscovite faction figures and, as such, underestimated to undermine the influence of the internal faction; this estimate was afterwards promoted in post-communist historiography to reinforce a stereotypical image of the regime as illegitimate. The early Communist Party had little influence in Romania. This was due to a number of factors: the country's lack of
industrial development, which resulted in a relatively small working class (with industry and mining employing fewer than 10% of the active population) and a large peasant population; the minor impact of
Marxism among Romanian
intellectuals; the success of state repression in driving the party underground and limiting its activities; and finally, the party's "anti-national" policy, as it began to be stated in the 1920s—supervised by the Comintern, this policy called for the breakup of
Greater Romania, which was regarded as a colonial entity "illegally occupying"
Transylvania,
Dobruja,
Bessarabia and
Bukovina (regions that, the communists argued, had been denied the right of
self-determination). In 1924, the Comintern provoked Romanian authorities by encouraging the
Tatarbunary Uprising in southern Bessarabia, in an attempt to create a
Moldavian republic on Romanian territory; also in that year, a
Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, roughly corresponding to
Transnistria, was established inside the Soviet Union. At the same time, the left-wing political spectrum was dominated by
Poporanism, an original ideology which partly reflected
Narodnik influence, placed its focus on the peasantry (as it notably did with the early advocacy of
cooperative farming by
Ion Mihalache's
Peasants' Party), and usually strongly supported the post-1919 territorial status quo—although they tended to oppose the
centralized system it had come to imply. (In turn, the early conflict between the PCdR and other minor socialist groups has been attributed to the legacy of
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea's quasi-Poporanist ideas inside the latter, as an intellectual basis for the rejection of
Leninism.) The PCdR's "foreign" image was because
ethnic Romanians were a minority in its ranks until after the end of World War II: between 1924 and 1944, none of its
general secretaries was of Romanian ethnicity.
Interwar Romania had a minority population of 30%, and it was largely from this section that the party drew its membership—a large percentage of it was
Jews,
Hungarians and
Bulgarians. Actual or perceived ethnic discrimination against these minorities added to the appeal of
revolutionary ideas in their midst.
Communist Party of Romania (1921–1948) Comintern and internal wing Shortly after its creation, the PCdR's leadership was alleged by authorities to have been involved in
Max Goldstein's bomb attack on the
Parliament of Romania; all major party figures, including the general secretary
Gheorghe Cristescu, were prosecuted in the
Dealul Spirii Trial.
Constantin Argetoianu, the
Minister of the Interior in the
Alexandru Averescu,
Take Ionescu, and
Ion I. C. Brătianu cabinets, equated Comintern membership with
conspiracy, ordered the first in a series of repressions, and, in the context of trial, allowed for several communist activists (including
Leonte Filipescu) to be shot while in custody—alleging that they had attempted to flee. Consequently, Argetoianu stated his belief that"communism is over in Romania", which allowed for a momentary relaxing of pressures—begun by
King Ferdinand's granting of an
amnesty to the tried PCdR. The PCdR was thus unable to send representatives to the Comintern, and was virtually replaced abroad by a delegation of various activists who had fled to the
Soviet Union at various intervals (Romanian groups in Moscow and
Kharkiv, the sources of a "
Muscovite wing" in the following decades). The interior party only survived as an underground group after it was outlawed by the Brătianu government through the
Mârzescu Law (named after its proponent,
Minister of Justice Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu), passed in early 1924; Comintern sources indicate that, around 1928, it was losing contact with Soviet overseers. In 1925, the question of Romania's borders as posed by the Comintern led to protests by Cristescu and, eventually, to his exclusion from the party (
see Balkan Communist Federation). Around the time of the party's Fifth Congress in 1931, the Muscovite wing became the PCdR's main political factor:
Joseph Stalin replaced the entire party leadership, including the general secretary
Vitali Holostenco—appointing instead
Alexander Stefanski, who was at the time a member of the
Communist Party of Poland. The interior wing began organizing itself as a more efficient conspiratorial network through regained Comintern control. The onset of the
Great Depression in Romania, and the series of strikes infiltrated (and sometimes provoked) by the interior wing signified relative successes (
see Lupeni Strike of 1929), but gains were not capitalized—as lack of ideological appeal and suspicion of
Stalinist directives remained notable factors. In parallel, its leadership suffered changes that were meant to place it under an ethnic Romanian and working-class leadership—the emergence of a Stalin-backed group around
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej before and after the large-scale
Grivița Strikes. In 1934, Stalin's
Popular Front doctrine was not fully passed into the local party's politics, mainly due to the Soviet territorial policies (culminating in the 1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) and the widespread suspicion other left-wing forces maintained toward the Comintern. In 1934,
Petre Constantinescu-Iași and other PCdR supporters created
Amicii URSS, a pro-Soviet group reaching out to
intellectuals, itself banned later in the same year. During the
1937 elections, the Communists backed
Iuliu Maniu and the
National Peasants' Party against King
Carol II and the
Gheorghe Tătărescu government (who had intensified repression of Communist groups), participation in the move was explained by Communist
historiography as provoked by the
Social-Democrats' refusal to collaborate with the PCdR. In the years following the elections, the PCdR entered a phase of rapid decline, coinciding with the increasingly
authoritarian tone of King Carol's regime (but in fact inaugurated by the
1936 Craiova Trial of
Ana Pauker and other high-ranking Communists). Journals viewed as associates of the party were closed down, and all suspected PCdR activists faced detention (
see Doftana Prison).
Siguranța Statului, the Romanian
secret police, infiltrated the small interior wing and probably obtained valuable information about its activities. The financial resources of the party, ensured by Soviet support and by various satellite organizations (collecting funds in the name of causes such as
pacifism or support for the
Republican side in the
Spanish Civil War), were severely drained—by political difficulties at home, as well as, after 1939, by the severing of connections with Moscow in France and
Czechoslovakia. Consequently, the executive committee of the Comintern called on Romanian Communists to infiltrate the
National Renaissance Front (FRN), the newly created sole legal party of Carol's dictatorship, and attempt to attract members of its structures to the revolutionary cause. Until 1944, the group active inside Romania became split between the "
prison faction" (
political prisoners who looked to Gheorghiu-Dej as their leader) and the one around
Ștefan Foriș and
Remus Koffler. It was to be
Ana Pauker's mission to take over and reshape the surviving structure.
World War II s of the
Ion Antonescu regime, photographed in
Târgu Jiu camp in 1943 (
Nicolae Ceaușescu, future leader of
Communist Romania, is second from left) In 1940, Romania had to cede Bessarabia and
Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union and
Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria (
see Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, Treaty of Craiova); in contrast with the general mood, the PCdR welcomed both gestures along the lines of its earlier activism. Official history, after ca. 1950, stated that the PCdR protested
Northern Transylvania's cession to Hungary later in the same year (the
Second Vienna Arbitration), but evidence is inconclusive (party documents attesting the policy are dated after
Nazi Germany's
invasion of the Soviet Union). As the border changes sparked a political crisis leading to an Iron Guard takeover—the
National Legionary State—the interior wing's confusion intensified: the upper echelon faced investigation from
Georgi Dimitrov (as well as other Comintern officials) on charges of "
Trotskyism", As Romania came under the rule of
Ion Antonescu and, as an
Axis country, joined in the German
offensive against the Soviets, the Communist Party began approaching traditional parties that were engaged in semi-clandestine opposition to Antonescu: alongside the
Social Democrats, it began talks with the
National Peasants' and the
National Liberal parties. At the time, virtually all the interior leadership was imprisoned at various locations (most of them
interned at
Caransebeș or in a
concentration camp near
Târgu Jiu). Some communists, such as
Petre Gheorghe,
Filimon Sârbu,
Francisc Panet or
Ștefan Plavăț, tried to establish organised resistance groups; however, they were quickly captured by the Romanian authorities and executed, as were some of the more active propagandists, such as
Pompiliu Ștefu. A statistic of the
Siguranţa reports that, in Bucharest, between January 1941 and September 1942, 143 individuals were tried for communism, of which 19 were sentenced to death and 78 to prison terms or
forced labour. The
antisemitic Antonescu regime established a distinction between PCdR members of
Jewish Romanian origin and those of
ethnic Romanian or other heritage, deporting the majority of the former, alongside Romanian and
Bessarabian Jews in general, to camps, prisons and makeshift
ghettos in occupied
Transnistria (
see Holocaust in Romania). Most Jews from the PCdR category were held in
Vapniarka, where improper feeding caused an outbreak of paralysis, and in
Rîbnița, where some 50 were victims of the authorities'
criminal negligence and were shot by retreating German troops in March 1944. In June 1943, at a time when troops were suffering major defeats on the
Eastern Front, the PCdR proposed that all parties form a
Blocul Național Democrat ("National Democratic Bloc"), in order to arrange for Romania to withdraw from its alliance with Nazi Germany. The ensuing talks were prolonged by various factors, most notably by the opposition of National Peasants' Party leader
Iuliu Maniu, who, alarmed by Soviet successes, was trying to reach a satisfactory compromise with the
Western Allies (and, together with the National Liberals' leader
Dinu Brătianu, continued to back negotiations initiated by Antonescu and
Barbu Știrbey with the United States and the United Kingdom).
1944 Coup greet Romania's new ally, the
Red Army, on 31 August 1944 In early 1944, as the
Red Army reached and crossed the
Prut River during the
Second Jassy–Kishinev Offensive, the self-confidence and status gained by the PCdR made possible the creation of the Bloc, which was designed as the basis of a future anti-Axis government. Parallel contacts were established, through
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and
Emil Bodnăraș, between the PCdR, the Soviets, and
King Michael. A seminal event also occurred during those months:
Ștefan Foriș, who was still general secretary, was deposed by with Soviet approval by the rival "
prison faction" (at the time, it was headed by former inmates of Caransebeș prison); replaced with the
troika formed by
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej,
Constantin Pîrvulescu, and
Iosif Rangheț, Foriș was discreetly assassinated in 1946. Several assessments view Foriș's dismissal as the complete rupture in historical continuity between the PCdR established in 1921 and what became the ruling party of
Communist Romania. On 23 August 1944, King Michael, a number of
Romanian Armed Forces officers, and armed Communist-led civilians supported by the National Democratic Bloc arrested dictator
Ion Antonescu and seized control of the state (''see
King Michael's Coup''). King Michael then proclaimed the old
1923 Constitution in force, ordered the Romanian Army to enter a
ceasefire with the Red Army on the
Moldavian front, and withdrew Romania from the Axis. Later party discourse tended to dismiss the importance of both the Soviet offensive and the dialogue with other forces (and eventually described the coup as a revolt with large popular support). The King named General
Constantin Sănătescu as
prime minister of a
coalition government which was dominated by the military, but included one representative each from the National Liberal Party, National Peasants' Party and Social Democratic Party, with Pătrășcanu as
Minister of Justice—the first Communist to hold high office in Romania. The Red Army entered
Bucharest on 31 August, and thereafter played a crucial role in supporting the Communist Party's rise to power as the Soviet military command virtually ruled the city and the country (
see Soviet occupation of Romania).
In opposition to Sănătescu and Rădescu 's ANEF Stadium After having been underground for two decades, the Communists enjoyed little popular support at first, compared to the other opposition parties (however, the decrease in popularity of the National Liberals was reflected in the forming of a splinter group around
Gheorghe Tătărescu, the
National Liberal Party-Tătărescu, who later entered an alliance with the Communist Party). Soon after 23 August, the Communists also engaged in a campaign against Romania's main political group of the time, the National Peasants' Party, and its leaders
Iuliu Maniu and
Ion Mihalache. In
Victor Frunză's account, the conflict's first stage was centered on Communist allegations that Maniu had encouraged violence against the
Hungarian community in newly recovered
Northern Transylvania. The Communist Party, engaged in a massive recruitment campaign, was able to attract ethnic Romanians in large numbers—workers and intellectuals alike, including some former members of the fascist
Iron Guard. By 1947, it grew to around 710,000 members. Although the PCR was still highly disorganized and factionalized, it benefited from Soviet backing (including that of
Vladislav Petrovich Vinogradov and other Soviet appointees to the
Allied Commission). After 1944, it was leading a paramilitary wing, the Patriotic Defense (
Apărarea Patriotică, disbanded in 1948), and a cultural society, the
Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union. On PCdR initiative, the National Democratic Bloc was dissolved on 8 October 1944; instead, the Communists, Social Democrats, the
Ploughmen's Front,
Mihai Ralea's
Socialist Peasants' Party (which was absorbed by the former in November), the
Hungarian People's Union (MADOSZ), and
Mitiţă Constantinescu's
Union of Patriots formed the
National Democratic Front (FND), which campaigned against the government, demanding the appointment of more Communist officials and sympathizers, while claiming democratic legitimacy and alleging that Sănătescu had dictatorial ambitions. The FND was soon joined by the Liberal group around Tătărescu,
Nicolae L. Lupu's ''Democratic Peasants' Party'' (the latter claimed the legacy from the defunct
Peasants' Party), and
Anton Alexandrescu's faction (separated from the
National Peasants' Party). Sănătescu resigned in November, but was persuaded by King
Michael to form a second government which collapsed within weeks. General
Nicolae Rădescu was asked to form a government and appointed
Teohari Georgescu to the
Ministry of the Interior, which allowed for the introduction of Communists into the security forces. The Communist Party subsequently launched a campaign against the Rădescu government, including the mass demonstration of 24 February that resulted in four deaths among the participants. According to Frunză, this culminated in a 13 February 1945 demonstration outside the
Royal Palace, and followed a week later by street fighting between Georgescu's Communist forces and supporters of the National Peasants' Party in Bucharest. In a period of escalating chaos, Rădescu called for elections. The Soviet deputy foreign minister
Andrey Vyshinsky went to Bucharest to request the monarch that he appoint Communist sympathizer
Petru Groza as Prime Minister, with the Soviet government suggesting it would reinstate Romanian sovereignty over
Northern Transylvania only in such a scenario. Frunză claimed however that Vyshinsky also intimated a Soviet takeover of the country if the King failed to comply, and that, under pressure from Soviet troops who were supposedly disarming the Romanian military and occupying key installations, Michael agreed and dismissed Rădescu, who fled the country.
First Groza cabinet ,
Constantin Pîrvulescu,
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu,
Ana Pauker,
Teohari Georgescu,
Florica Bagdasar and
Gheorghe Vasilichi On 6 March, Groza became leader of a Communist-led government and named Communists to lead the
Romanian Armed Forces as well as the ministries of the
Interior (Georgescu),
Justice (
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu),
Communications (
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej), Propaganda (
Petre Constantinescu-Iaşi) and
Finance (
Vasile Luca). The non-Communist ministers came from the Social Democrats (who were falling under the control of the pro-Communists
Lothar Rădăceanu and
Ștefan Voitec) and the traditional
Ploughmen's Front ally, as well as, nominally, from the National Peasants' and
National Liberal parties (followers of Tătărescu and Alexandrescu's dissident wings). As a result of the
Potsdam Conference, where
Western Allied governments refused to recognize Groza's administration, King Michael called on Groza to resign. When he refused, the monarch went to his summer home in
Sinaia and refused to sign any government decrees or bills (a period colloquially known as
greva regală—"the royal strike"). Following Anglo-American mediation, Groza agreed to include politicians from outside his electoral alliance, appointing two secondary figures in their parties (the National Liberal
Mihail Romniceanu and the National Peasants'
Emil Hațieganu) as
Ministers without Portfolio (January 1946). At the time, Groza's party and the PCR came to disagree on some issues (with the Front publicly affirming its support for private land ownership), before the Ploughmen's Front was eventually pressured into supporting Communist tenets. In the meantime, the first measure taken by the cabinet was a new
land reform that advertised, among others, an interest into peasant issues and a respect for property (in front of common fears that a
Leninist program was about to be adopted). According to Frunză, although contrasted by the Communist press with its previous equivalent, the measure was supposedly much less relevant—land awarded to individual farmers in 1923 was more than three times the 1945 figures, and all effects were canceled by the 1948–1962
collectivization. It was also then that, through Pătrășcanu and
Alexandru Drăghici, the Communists consecrated their control of the legal system—the process included the creation of the
Romanian People's Tribunals, charged with investigating
war crimes, and constantly supported by
agitprop in the Communist press. During the period, government-backed Communists used various means to exercising influence over the vast majority of the press, and began infiltrating or competing with independent cultural forums. Economic dominance, partly responding to Soviet requirements, was first effected through the
SovRoms (created in the summer of 1945), directing the bulk of Romanian trade towards the Soviet Union.
1945 restructuring and second Groza cabinet The Communist Party held its first open conference (16–22 October 1945, at the
Mihai Viteazul High School in
Bucharest) and agreed to replace the
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej–
Constantin Pîrvulescu–
Iosif Rangheț troika with a joint leadership reflecting an uneasy balance between the external and internal wings: while Gheorghiu-Dej retained his general secretary position,
Ana Pauker,
Teohari Georgescu, and
Vasile Luca became the other main leaders. The Central Committee had 27 full members •
Gheorghe Apostol •
Emil Bodnăraș •
Constantin Câmpeanu •
Nicolae Ceaușescu •
Iosif Chișinevschi •
Miron Constantinescu – Politburo member •
Dumitru Coliu •
Constanța Crăciun •
Teohari Georgescu – Politburo member, Secretary •
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej – Politburo member, Secretary •
Vasile Luca – Politburo member, Secretary •
Gheorghe Maurer • •
Alexandru Moghioroș •
Andrei Neagu •
Constantin Pârvulescu – President of Central Control Commission •
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu •
Andrei Pătrașcu •
Ana Pauker – Politburo member, Secretary •
Emil Popa •
Ilie Popa •
Iosif Rangheț •
Leontin Silaghi •
Chivu Stoica – Politburo member • • •
Gheorghe Vasilichi – Politburo member and 8 candidate members •
Liuba Chișinevschi •
Ilie Drăgan •
Alexandru Drăghici •
Dumitru Focșăneanu •
Mihai Mujic •
Ion Petre •
Gheorghe Radnev •
Mihail Roșianu The post-1945 constant growth in membership, by far the highest of all
Eastern Bloc countries, was to provide a base of support for Gheorghiu-Dej. The conference also saw the first mention of the PCdR as the
Romanian Communist Party (PCR), the new name being used as a propaganda tool suggesting a closer connection with the
national interest. Party control over the security forces was successfully used on 8 November 1945, when the opposition parties organised a demonstration in front of the
Royal Palace to express solidarity with King Michael, who was still refusing to sign his name to new legislation, on the occasion of his
name day. Demonstrators were faced with gunshots; around 10 people were killed, and many wounded. The official account, according to which the Groza government responded to a coup attempt, was disputed by Frunză. The PCR and its allies, grouped in the Bloc of Democratic Parties, won the
Romanian elections of 19 November, although there is evidence of widespread
electoral fraud. Years later, historian Petre Ţurlea reviewed an incomplete confidential PCR report about the election that confirmed the Bloc won around 48 percent of the vote. He concluded that had the election been conducted fairly, the opposition parties could have won enough votes between them to form a coalition government, albeit with far less than the 80 percent support opposition supporters long claimed. The following months were dedicated to confronting the
National Peasants' Party, which was annihilated after the
Tămădău Affair and
show trial of its entire leadership. On 30 December 1947, the Communist Party's power was consolidated when King Michael was forced to
abdicate. The Communist-dominated legislature then abolished the monarchy and proclaimed Romania a "
People's Republic", firmly aligned with the Soviet Union. According to the king, his signature was obtained after the Groza cabinet representatives threatened to kill 1,000 students they had rounded up in custody.
Romanian Workers' Party (1948–1965) Creation with delegates to the February 1948 PCR congress (the young
Nicolae Ceaușescu stands to his left) In February 1948, the Communists ended a long process of infiltrating the
Romanian Social Democratic Party (ensuring control through electoral alliances and the two-party
Frontul Unic Muncitoresc—Singular Workers' Front, the PCR had profited from the departure of
Constantin Titel Petrescu's group from the Social Democrats in March 1946). The Social Democrats merged with the PCR to form the '''Romanian Workers' Party'
(Partidul Muncitoresc Român, PMR'') which remained the ruling party's official name until 24 July 1965 (when it returned to the designation as
Romanian Communist Party). Nevertheless, Social Democrats were excluded from most party posts and were forced to support Communist policies on the basis of
democratic centralism; it was also reported that only half of the PSD's 500,000 members joined the newly founded grouping. Capitalizing on these gains, the Communist government shunted most of the remaining parties aside after the
1948 elections (the
Ploughmen's Front and the
Hungarian People's Union dissolved themselves in 1953). The PMR fought the elections as the dominant partner of the
People's Democratic Front (FND), which won with 93.2 percent of the vote. By then, however, the FND had taken on the same character as other "
popular fronts"in the Soviet bloc. The member parties became completely subservient to the PMR, and had to accept its"
leading role"as a condition of their continued existence. Groza, however, remained Prime Minister. A new series of economic changes followed: the
National Bank of Romania was passed into full
public ownership (December 1946), and, in order to combat the
Romanian leu's
devaluation, a surprise
monetary reform was imposed as a
stabilization measure in August 1947 (severely limiting the amount convertible by people without an actual job, primarily members of the aristocracy). The
Marshall Plan was being overtly condemned, while
nationalization and a
planned economy were enforced beginning 11 June 1948. The first
five-year plan, conceived by
Miron Constantinescu's Soviet-Romanian committee, was adopted in 1950. Of newly enforced measures, the arguably most far-reaching was
collectivization—by 1962, when the process was considered complete, 96% of the total
arable land had been enclosed in
collective farming, while around 80,000 peasants faced trial for resisting and 17,000 others were uprooted or
deported for being
chiaburi (the Romanian equivalent of
kulaks). Chiaburs were defined by the Party as the common enemies of communism in Romania. Thus, they were subjected to abuses by the cadres. In 1950, the party, which viewed itself as the
vanguard of the working class, reported that people of
proletarian origin held 64% of party offices and 40% of higher government posts, while results of the recruitment efforts remained below official expectations.
Internal purges During the period, the central scene of the PMR was occupied by the conflict between the "
Muscovite wing", the "
prison wing" led by
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and the newly emerged and weaker "
Secretariat wing" led by
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu. After October 1945, the two former groups had associated in neutralizing Pătrăşcanu's—exposed as "
bourgeois" and progressively marginalized, it was ultimately decapitated in 1948. Beginning that year, the PMR leadership officially questioned its own political support, and began a massive campaign to remove "foreign and hostile elements" from its rapidly expanded structures. In 1952, with Stalin's renewed approval, Gheorghiu-Dej emerged victorious from the confrontation with
Ana Pauker, his chief "Muscovite" rival, as well as purging
Vasile Luca,
Teohari Georgescu, and their supporters from the party—alleging that their various political attitudes were proof of "
right-wing deviationism". Out of a membership of approximately one million, between 300,000 and 465,000 The move against Pauker's group echoed
Stalinist purges of Jews in particular from other Communist Parties in the
Eastern bloc—notably, the
anti-"Cosmopolitan" campaign in which
Joseph Stalin targeted Jews in the Soviet Union, and the
Prague Trials in
Czechoslovakia which removed Jews from leading positions in that country's Communist government. At the same time, a
new republican constitution, replacing its 1948 precedent, legislated Stalinist tenets, and proclaimed that "the people's democratic state is consistently carrying out the policy of enclosing and eliminating capitalist elements". Gheorghiu-Dej, who remained an orthodox Stalinist, took the position of
Premier while moving Groza to the presidency of the Presidium of the Great National Assembly (de facto
President of the People's Republic). Executive and PMR leaderships remained in Gheorghiu-Dej's hands until his death in 1965 (with the exception of 1954–1955, when his office of PMR leader was taken over by
Gheorghe Apostol). From the moment it came to power and until Stalin's death, as the
Cold War erupted, the PMR endorsed Soviet requirements for the
Eastern Bloc. Aligning the country with the
Cominform, it officially condemned
Josip Broz Tito's
independent actions in
Yugoslavia; Tito was routinely attacked by the official press, and the Romanian-Yugoslav
Danube border became the scene of massive
agitprop displays (
see Tito–Stalin split and Informbiro).
Gheorghiu-Dej and de-Stalinization (front row, left) seeing off
Nikita Khrushchev (front row, right) at Bucharest's
Băneasa Airport upon the close of the PMR's 3rd Congress (June 1960). Nicolae Ceauşescu can be seen at Gheorghiu-Dej's right hand side. Uncomfortable and possibly threatened by the reformist measures adopted by Stalin's successor,
Nikita Khrushchev, Gheorghiu-Dej began to steer Romania towards a more "independent" path while remaining within the Soviet orbit during the late 1950s. Following the
Twentieth Party Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which Khurshchev initiated
De-Stalinization, Gheorghiu-Dej issued propaganda accusing Pauker, Luca and Georgescu of having been an arch-Stalinists responsible for the party's excesses in the late 1940s and early 1950s (notably, in regard to collectivization)—despite the fact that they had occasionally opposed a number of radical measures advocated by the General Secretary. After that purge, Gheorghiu-Dej had begun promoting PMR activists who were perceived as more loyal to his own political views; among them were
Nicolae Ceauşescu,
Gheorghe Stoica,
Ghizela Vass,
Grigore Preoteasa,
Alexandru Bârlădeanu,
Ion Gheorghe Maurer,
Gheorghe Gaston Marin,
Paul Niculescu-Mizil, and
Gheorghe Rădulescu; in parallel, citing Khrushchevite precedents, the PMR briefly reorganized its leadership on a plural basis (1954–1955), while Gheorghiu-Dej reshaped party doctrine to include ambiguous messages about Stalin's legacy (insisting on the defunct Soviet's leader contribution to Marxist thought, official documents also deplored his
personality cult and encouraged Stalinists to
self-criticism). In this context, the PMR soon dismissed all the relevant consequences of the Twentieth Soviet Congress, and Gheorghiu-Dej even argued that De-Stalinization had been imposed by his team right after 1952. At a party meeting in March 1956, two members of the
Politburo who were supporters of Khruschevite reforms,
Miron Constantinescu and
Iosif Chişinevschi, criticized Gheorghiu-Dej's leadership and identified him with Romanian Stalinism. They were purged in 1957, themselves accused of being Stalinists and of having been plotting with Pauker. Through Ceaușescu's voice, Gheorghiu-Dej also marginalized another group of old members of the PMR, associated with
Constantin Doncea (June 1958). On the outside too, the PMR, leading a country that had joined the
Warsaw Pact, remained an agent of political repression: it fully supported Khurshchev's invasion of
Hungary in response to the
Revolution of 1956, after which
Imre Nagy and other dissident Hungarian leaders were imprisoned on Romanian soil. The Hungarian rebellion also sparked student protests in such places as Bucharest,
Timișoara,
Oradea,
Cluj and
Iași, which contributed to unease inside the PMR and resulted in a wave of arrests. While refusing to allow dissemination of Soviet literature exposing Stalinism (writers such as
Ilya Ehrenburg and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Romanian leaders took active part in the campaign against
Boris Pasternak. Despite Stalin's death, the massive police apparatus headed by the
Securitate (created in 1949 and rapidly growing in numbers) maintained a steady pace in its suppression of "
class enemies", until as late as 1962–1964. In 1962–1964, the party leadership approved a mass
amnesty, extended to, among other prisoners, ca. 6,700 guilty of
political crimes. This marked a toning down in the violence and scale of repression, after almost twenty years during which the Party had acted against political opposition and
active anti-communist resistance, as well as against
religious institutions (most notably, the
Romanian Roman Catholic and
Greek-Catholic Churches). Estimates for the total number of victims in the 1947/1948-1964 period vary significantly: as low as 160,000 or 282,000 political prisoners, and as high 600,000
Gheorghiu-Dej and the "national path" 's funeral (March 1965).
Zhou Enlai and
Anastas Mikoyan are among them
Nationalism and
national communism penetrated official discourse, largely owing to Gheorghiu-Dej's call for economic independence and distancing from the
Comecon. Moves to withdraw the country from Soviet overseeing were taken in quick succession after 1953. Khrushchev allowed Constantinescu to dissolve the
SovRoms in 1954, followed by the closing of Romanian-Soviet cultural ventures such as
Editura Cartea Rusă at the end of the decade. Industrialization along the PMR's own directives highlighted Romanian independence—one of its consequences was the massive steel-producing industrial complex in
Galați, which, being dependent on imports of iron from overseas, was for long a major strain on the Romanian economy. In 1957, Gheorghiu-Dej and
Emil Bodnăraş persuaded the Soviets to withdraw their
remaining troops from Romanian soil. As early as 1956, Romania's political apparatus reconciled with
Josip Broz Tito, which led to a series of common economic projects (culminating in the
Iron Gates venture). A drastic divergence in ideological outlooks manifested itself only after autumn 1961, when the PMR's leadership felt threatened by the Soviet Union's will to impose the condemnation of Stalinism as the standard in communist states. Following the
Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and the
Soviet-Albanian split in 1961, Romania initially gave full support to the Khrushchev's stance, but maintained exceptionally good relations with both
Maoist China and
Communist Albania. Romanian media was alone among Warsaw Pact countries to report Chinese criticism of the Soviet leadership from its source; in return,
Maoist officials complimented Romanian nationalism by supporting the view that
Bessarabia had been a traditional victim of
Russian imperialism. The change in policies was to become obvious in 1964, when the Communist regime offered a stiff response to the
Valev Plan, a Soviet project of creating trans-national economic units and of assigning Romanian areas the task of supplying agricultural products. Several other measures of that year also presented themselves as radical changes in tone: after Gheorghiu-Dej endorsed
Andrei Oţetea's publishing of
Karl Marx's
Russophobic texts (uncovered by the
Polish historian
Stanisław Schwann), the PMR itself took a stand against Khrushchevite principles by issuing, in late April, a declaration published in
Scînteia, through which it stressed its commitment to a "national path" towards Communism (it read: "There does not and cannot exist a "parent" party and a "son" party or "superior" party and "subordinate" parties"). During late 1964, the PMR's leadership clashed with new Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev over the issue of
KGB advisers still present in the
Securitate, and eventually managed to have them recalled, making Romania the
Eastern Bloc's first country to have accomplished this. These actions gave Romania greater freedom in pursuing the program which Gheorghiu-Dej had been committed to since 1954, one allowing Romania to defy reforms in the Eastern Bloc and to maintain a largely Stalinist course. It has also been argued that Romania's emancipation was, in effect, limited to economic relations and military cooperation, being as such dependent on a relatively tolerant mood inside the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the PMR's nationalism made it increasingly popular with Romanian
intellectuals, and the last stage of the Gheorghiu-Dej regime was popularly identified with
liberalization.
Romanian Communist Party (1965–1989) Ceaușescu's rise and other PCR leaders in August 1968, addressing the Romanian public at a rally to oppose the
invasion of Czechoslovakia Gheorghiu-Dej died in March 1965 and was succeeded by a collective leadership made up of
Nicolae Ceaușescu as general secretary,
Chivu Stoica as president and
Ion Gheorghe Maurer as Premier. Ceaușescu removed rivals such as Stoica,
Alexandru Drăghici, and
Gheorghe Apostol from the government, and ultimately from the party leadership, and began accumulating posts for himself. By 1969, he was in complete control of the
Central Committee. The circumstances surrounding this process are still disputed, but theories evidence that the support given to him by
Ion Gheorghe Maurer and
Emil Bodnăraș, as well as the ascendancy of
Ilie Verdeț,
Virgil Trofin, and
Paul Niculescu-Mizil, were instrumental in ensuring legitimacy. Soon after 1965, Ceaușescu used his prerogatives to convoke a Party Commission headed by
Ion Popescu-Puțuri, charged with investigating both Stalinist legacy and Gheorghiu-Dej's purges: resulting in the
rehabilitation of a large number of Communist officials (including, among others,
Ștefan Foriș,
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu,
Miron Constantinescu,
Vasile Luca, and Romanian victims of the Soviet
Great Purge). This measure was instrumental in consolidating the new leadership while further increasing its distance from Gheorghiu-Dej's political legacy. In 1965, Ceaușescu declared that Romania was no longer a
People's Democracy but a
Socialist Republic and changed the name of the party back to the
Romanian Communist Party—steps which were meant to indicate that Romania was following strict Marxist policies while remaining independent. He continued Romanianization and de-Sovietization efforts by stressing notions such as
sovereignty and
self-determination. At the time, Ceauşescu made references to Gheorghiu-Dej's own
personality cult, while implying that his was to be a new style of leadership. In its official discourse, the PCR introduced the dogmas of "socialist democracy" and direct communication with the masses. Political scientist
Daniel Barbu, who noted that this social improvement trend began ca. 1950 and benefited 45% of the population, concluded that one of its main effects was to increase the citizens' dependency on the state. A seminal event occurred in August 1968, when Ceaușescu highlighted his anti-Soviet discourse by vocally opposing the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia; a highly popular measure with the Romanian public, it led to sizable enrollments in the PCR and the newly created paramilitary
Patriotic Guards (created with the goal of meeting a possible Soviet intervention in Romania). From 1965 to 1976, the PCR rose from approximately 1.4 million members to 2.6 million. In the contingency of an anti-Soviet war, the PCR even sought an alliance with the maverick
Yugoslav leader
Josip Broz Tito—negotiations did not yield a clear result. Although military intervention in Romania was reportedly taken into consideration by the Soviets, there is indication that
Leonid Brezhnev had himself ruled out Romanian participation in Warsaw Pact maneuvers, While it appears that Romanian leaders genuinely approved of the
Prague Spring reforms undertaken by
Alexander Dubček, Ceaușescu's gesture also served to consolidate his image as a national and independent communist leader. One year before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ceaușescu opened up diplomatic ties with
West Germany, and refused to break links with Israel following the
Six-Day War. Starting with the much-publicized visit by France's
Charles de Gaulle (May 1968), Romania was the recipient of Western world support going well into the 1970s (significant visits were paid by United States Presidents
Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford, in 1969 and 1975 respectively, while Ceaușescu was frequently received in Western capitals).
Ceaușescu's supremacy :
Ștefan Voitec handing him the
sceptre Ceaușescu developed a
cult of personality around himself and his wife
Elena (herself promoted to high offices) after visiting North Korea and noting the
parallel developed by
Kim Il Sung, while incorporating in it several aspects of past
authoritarian regimes in Romania (
see Conducător). During the early 1970s, while curbing liberalization, he launched his own version of China's
Cultural Revolution, announced by the
July Theses. In effect, measures to concentrate power in Ceaușescu's hands were taken as early as 1967, when the general secretary became the ultimate authority on foreign policy. At the time, a new organization was instituted under the name of
Front of Socialist Unity (eventually renamed the
Front of Socialist Unity and Democracy). Ostensibly a popular front affiliating virtually all non-party members, it was actually tightly controlled by party activists. It was intended to consolidate the impression that the entire population was backing Ceaușescu's policies. As a result of these new policies, the
Central Committee, which acted as the main PCR body between Congresses, had increased to 265 full members and 181 candidate members (supposed to meet at least four times a year). Members of the upper echelons of the party who objected to Ceaușescu's stance were accused of supporting Soviet policies; they included
Alexandru Bârlădeanu, who criticized the heavy loans contracted in support of industrialization policies. In time, the new leader distanced himself from Maurer and
Corneliu Mănescu, while his career profited from the deaths of Stoica (who committed suicide) and Sălăjan (who died while undergoing surgery). Instead, he came to rely on a new generation of activists, among them
Manea Mănescu. At the XIth Party Congress in 1974,
Gheorghe Cioară, the
Mayor of Bucharest, proposed to extend Ceaușescu's office as General Secretary for life, but was turned down by the latter. Shortly before that moment, the collective leadership of the Presidium was replaced with a Political Executive Committee, which, in practice, elected itself; together with the Secretariat, it was controlled by Ceaușescu himself, who was president of both bodies. this was the first in a succession of titles, also including
Conducător ("Leader"), "supreme commander of the
Romanian People's Army", "honorary president of the
Romanian Academy", and "first among the country's miners". Progressively after 1967, the large bureaucratic structure of the PCR again replicated and interfered with state administration and economic policies. The President himself became noted for frequent visits on location at various enterprises, where he would dispense directives, for which the termed
indicații prețioase ("valuable advice") was coined by official propaganda. Despite the party's independent, "national communist" course, the absolute control that Ceaușescu had over the party and the country, combined with the ubiquity of his personality cult, led to some non-Romanian observers describing the PCR as one of the closest things to an old-style Stalinist party. For instance,
Encyclopædia Britannica referred to the last 18 years of Ceaușescu's tenure as a period of "
neo-Stalinism", and the last edition of the
Country Study on Romania referred to the PCR's "Stalinist repression of individual liberties."
Late 1970s crisis The renewed industrialization, which based itself on both a dogmatic understanding of
Marxian economics and a series of
autarkic goals, brought major economic problems to Romania, beginning with the effects of the
1973 oil crisis, and worsened by the
1979 energy crisis. The profound neglect of
services and decline in
quality of life, first manifested when much of the budget was diverted to support an over-sized industry, was made more drastic by the political decision to pay in full the country's
external debt (in 1983, this was set at 10 billion United States dollars, of which 4.5 billion was accumulated
interest). By March 1989, the debt had been paid in full. Two other programs initiated under Ceaușescu had massive consequences on social life. One of them was the plan, announced as early as 1965, to "
systemize rural areas", which was meant to urbanize Romania at a fast pace (of over 13,000
communes, the country was supposed to be left with 6,000); it also brought massive changes for the cities—especially
Bucharest, where, following the
1977 earthquake and successive demolitions, new architectural guidelines were imposed (
see Ceaușima). By 1966, Romania
outlawed abortion, and, progressively after that, measures were endorsed to artificially increase the birth rate—including special taxes for childless couples. Another measure, going hand in hand with economic ones, allowed ethnic Germans a chance to leave Romania and settle in
West Germany as
Auslandsdeutsche, in return for payments from the latter country. Overall, around 200,000 Germans left, most of them
Transylvanian Saxons and
Banat Swabians. Although Romania adhered to the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (1973) and signed the 1975
Helsinki Final Act, Ceauşescu also intensified political repression in the country (beginning in 1971). This took a drastic turn in 1977, when, confronted with
Paul Goma's movement in support for
Charter 77, the regime expelled him and others from the country. A more serious disobedience occurred in August of the same year, when
Jiu Valley miners went on strike, briefly took hold of Premier
Ilie Verdeţ, and, despite having reached an agreement with the government, were repressed and some of them expelled (''see
Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977''). A newly created and independent trade union,
SLOMR, was crushed and its leaders arrested on various charges in 1979. Progressively during the period, the
Securitate relied on
involuntary commitment to
psychiatric hospitals as a means to punish
dissidence.
1980s in 1985 A major act of discontent occurred inside the party during its XIIth Congress in late November 1979, when PCR veteran
Constantin Pîrvulescu spoke out against Ceaușescu's policy of discouraging discussions and relying on obedient
cadres (he was subsequently heckled, evicted from the Congress hall, and isolated). In 1983,
Radu Filipescu, an engineer working in Bucharest, was imprisoned after distributing 20,000 leaflets which called for a popular rally against the regime, while a protests of miners in
Maramureș County against wage cuts was broken up by Securitate forces; three years later a strike organized by Romanian and Hungarian industrial workers in
Turda and
Cluj-Napoca met with the same result. Also in 1983, fearing the multiplication of
samizdat documents,
Minister of the Interior George Homoștean ordered all citizens to hand over their
typewriters to the authorities. This coincided with a noted popular rise in support for outspoken dissidents who were kept under house arrest, among whom were
Doina Cornea and
Mihai Botez. By 1983, membership of the PCR had risen to 3.3 million, and, in 1989, to 3.7–3.8 million while membership became a basic requirement in numerous social contexts, leading to purely formal allegiances and
political clientelism. At the same time, the ideological viewpoint was changed, with the party no longer seen as the
vanguard of the working class, but as the main social factor and the embodiment of the
national interest. In marked contrast with the
Perestroika and
Glasnost policies developed in the Soviet Union by
Mikhail Gorbachev, Romania adopted
Neo-Stalinist principles in both its internal policies and its relations with the outside world. As recorded in 1984, 90% of the PCR members were
ethnic Romanians, with 7% Hungarians (the latter group's membership had dropped by more than 2% since the previous Congress). After 1980, the nationalist ideology adopted by the PCR progressively targeted the Hungarian community as a whole, based on suspicions of its allegiance to Hungary, whose policies had become diametrically opposed to the methods of Romanian leaders (
see Goulash Communism). Especially during the 1980s, clientelism was further enhanced by a new policy,
rotația cadrelor ("cadre rotation" or "reshuffling"), placing strain on low-level officials to seek the protection of higher placed ones as a means to preserve their position or to be promoted. This effectively prompted activists who did not approve of the change in tone to retire, while others—
Virgil Trofin,
Ion Iliescu and
Paul Niculescu-Mizil among them—were officially dispatched to low-ranking positions or otherwise marginalized. In June 1988, the leadership of the Political Executive Committee was reduced from 15 to 7 members, including Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife.
Downfall Announced by a February 1987 protest of workers and students in
Iași, the final crisis of the PCR and its regime began in the autumn, when industrial employees in
Brașov called a strike that immediately drew echoes with the city's population (
see Brașov Rebellion). In December, authorities convened a public
kangaroo trial of the movement's leaders, and handed out sentences of imprisonment and internal exile. At around the same time,
systematization provoked an international response, as Romania was subjected to a resolution of the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which called for an inquiry into the state of ethnic minorities and the rural population; the political isolation experienced by Communist Romania was highlighted by the fact that Hungary endorsed the report, while all other Eastern bloc countries abstained. This followed more than a decade of deteriorating relations between the PCR and the
Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. In the face of the changes that unfolded in the rest of Eastern Europe in 1988 and 1989, the PCR retained its image as one of the most unreconstructed parties in the Soviet bloc. It even went as far as to call for a Warsaw Pact invasion of Poland after that country's Communists announced a power-sharing agreement with the
Solidarity trade union—a sharp reversal of its previous opposition to the
Brezhnev Doctrine and its vehement opposition to the invasion of Czechoslovakia 21 years earlier. Having fled the PCR's headquarters under pressure from demonstrators, Ceauşescu and his wife were captured,
tried, and executed by the new authorities in
Târgoviște. No formal dissolution of the PCR took place. Rather, the party simply disappeared. The speed with which the PCR, one of the largest parties of its kind, dissolved, as well as its spontaneity, were held by commentators as additional proof that its sizable membership presented a largely false image of its true beliefs. with the latter entering Parliament in the 1992–1996 legislature under its former name of
Socialist Party of Labour. == General secretaries (1921–1989) ==